This turned into a long one...
A comparative analysis of financial privacy across ten systems: Bitcoin's transparent baseline, WabiSabi CoinJoin, Lightning Network, Spark, Ark, shielded client-side validation, Monero RingCT, Monero's upcoming FCMP++, Zcash's Sapling and Orchard pools, and DarkFi's anonymous-everything architecture.
Each system stakes its design on a different anonymity set, trust model, and architectural layer. The result is a spectrum from adequate plausible deniability to full untraceability, and your threat model determines which point on that spectrum you need.
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